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Ex-Foundation member bitter

Southwest Times Record
By Linda Seubold

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David Kroopf watched with contempt as Tony Alamo walked away from the Washing ton County jail in Fayetteville Tuesday afternoon.

“When I saw him walk out of there free, it made me sick,” Kroopf said. “All I could think was — there’s the man who has destroyed my life and taken my wife and daughter from me. Now he’s got my daughter sit ting on his knee and has kept me from her for three years without even a letter or a phone call. What a scum.”

Kroopf’s ex-wife, Sharon, is Mrs. Tony Alamo.

The Kroopfs were married Dec. 27, 1980. They divorced Dec. 2, 1988 in Crawford County, after living in Alamo Foundation housing in Dyer about two years, Kroopf said. The couple had one child, Rebecca, born Oct. 29, 1981.

Kroopf said his wife’s affections were alienated by Alamo. Sharon Kroopf married Alamo in 1989.

According to court records of the divorce, Kroopf is to be allowed to visit his daughter every other weekend and holiday, during Christmas vacation, and six weeks each summer.

Kroopf said he has been “down on his luck” since the divorce and doesn’t expect to get custody of his daughter, but that his visitation rights should be honored.

“After the divorce decree they’ve let me see Becky just once, in Saugus, Calif., in a Denny’s Restaurant for about 10 minutes, with a foundation worker,” Kroopf said. “The last day I spent with her before the divorce, we ate Chinese food and saw Walt Disney’s ‘Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.’ Sharon called it evil and non-scriptural and an unsuitable movie for Becky.”

Kroopf claims his ex-wife and Alamo are keeping his daughter “in captivity, out of public school and away from contact with outsiders,” and that the girl has been beaten by his ex-wife and foundation members. He said Tuesday he has volunteered to testify as a witness for the prosecution in the California child abuse case pending against Alamo.

“If I had the money to fight this in court, I would,” Kroopf said. “But Tony broke me. Everyone in the foundation knew I was successful and wealthy before I moved in there.”

Kroopf, a native of Los Angeles, said he first came into contact with Alamo’s Tony and Susan Alamo Christian Foundation in Los Angeles, where Kroopf said he liked attending church services led by Tony and Susan Alamo.

In 1988, at his wife’s insistence, Kroopf says, he moved his family from Texarkana, where he was ready to open a jewelry store, to a two-bedroom foundation-owned house in Dyer.

“It was the biggest mistake I ever made,” he says now. “I lasted there about a year and three months before they kicked me out and confiscated all my jewelry and everything.”

Kroopf said he was accused of taking money from the foundation but that he had withheld nothing from Alamo. Kroopf claims that taking someone into the foundation, getting all their worldly goods, then accusing them of stealing or some other “trumped up charge” and then evicting them, owning nothing, is a “common tactic of Alamo’s.”

In: Eye Witness & First Hand Accounts of Abuse

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